Formerly Free Mint QuickView Financial App For Mac Is Now Five Bucks

Mint.com, the slick and extremely useful financial tracking website, also has iOS and OS X apps to natively keep an eye on your finances. The Mac app came out in early July of this year, and was updated to version 2.0 at the end of August. Today, however, it has gone from being a free app to asking for a cool $4.99.

Mint.com, an Intuit (makers of Quicken and TurboTax), updated their OS X compatible app to version 2.0, adding budgeting, available cash balances, loan transactions, some hooks for Notification Center in Mountain Lion, and any and all interactions with debt-recovery companies like moorcroft. iOS and Mac software tracking site, AppShopper.com, shows three successive price changes in the last two days, starting with a price increase on the 16th of September to $4.99, then a price drop today to Free again, and then a final price increase today to the current price of $4.99.

A Mint representative told TUAW’s Mike Grothaus today that the QuickView Mac app was running as a test, and that the app has shown itself to be worth developing from here on out.

“QuickView is here to stay (was running as a test) and will now cost $4.99 in the App Store,” the representative said in a statement. “Those who have already downloaded the app won’t be charged. The cost will go to support further development for this platform and beyond. Wanted to reach out to you proactively, as I’m sure the change won’t go unnoticed, and transparency is a key tenet of Mint.com.”

If you think that using the Mac app is more useful than using your Mac to access the website, which has no charge associated with it, then you can go right ahead and purchase Mint’s QuickView app from the Mac App store now. Of course, if you’ve already downloaded it, you won’t need to pay for it at all; the new 2.0 update is yours for free.